Oblivion Loading Times.. Explained?

McDaniel

McDaniel

McDaniel

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If you've been experiencing long load times for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, then it could be you have one of the rare cases of over-fragmentation of the hard drive. The idea here was to use the hard drive to substantially cache the data, therefore optimizing gameplay. However it turns out that some systems are getting bogged down by the move. Anything from menus to sounds can load too slow.

There's a harmless solution for this: "To solve this problem, reset your Xbox, and hold down the A button as the game is booting up. If any button is held while Oblivion is loading, it will clear its hard drive cache, and create a new one. Once you see the “Bethesda Softworks” logo video, the game is already loaded, and the cache should have been cleared."

Has anyone out there had this problem? If so, did this help?
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Source : http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2006/03/21/long-load-times-in-tes-oblivion-try-this/
 
It'll be quite interesting to see this feature in action. I wonder how many other games will allow the user to clear the game cache, or access certain functions by holding down buttons upon startup? Arr I want olbivioioain!
 
oweneades said:
Does this mean it requires the HD to play?

(I have a core here)
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It doesn't need one but loading times are faster if you have a HDD due to it being able to cache data.
 
Kainz said:
It'll be quite interesting to see this feature in action. I wonder how many other games will allow the user to clear the game cache, or access certain functions by holding down buttons upon startup? Arr I want olbivioioain!
Click to expand...

It could prove very useful. On the Xbox, there were occassional cache problems that caused problems with save games (including me losing my KOTOR2 save 35 hours into the game :/), and being able to clear the cache would have solved a lot of them.
 
I just bought a hard drive to replace my memory card tonight (or so i thought)

Clipped it in, recognised it no bother, moved my Oblivion game saves(and profile)to the drive.
Loaded Oblivion, took an absolute age to load (zx spectrum age!), continued for half an hour and seen a grand total of about five areas...totally unplayable. So i seen this press A fix to clear the cache (the drives brand new lol, but i was willing to try anythin), no different, slower than a sunderland centre half. So...

rebooted without the memory card in (figured they may be clashing somehow), but still the same unplayable game. So then i moved saves back to the memory card and removed hard drive.

Went to play the game, voila, back to normal relatively seamless loading times using the memory card.
Anyone else heard of this or know the reason why this happens to my hard drive?
I thought getting a hard drive would improve loading times, instead its the complete opposite :confused:
 
I did actualy wonder today how I can defrag the hard drive ... another thing, I have A new Xbox, so no stuff on it yet, not even a profile, but it says 12gb free ... surely the OS cant take 8gb ? :eek:

Sorry to go OT, but this is kinda related :o
 
bruce said:
I just bought a hard drive to replace my memory card tonight (or so i thought)

Clipped it in, recognised it no bother, moved my Oblivion game saves(and profile)to the drive.
Loaded Oblivion, took an absolute age to load (zx spectrum age!), continued for half an hour and seen a grand total of about five areas...totally unplayable. So i seen this press A fix to clear the cache (the drives brand new lol, but i was willing to try anythin), no different, slower than a sunderland centre half. So...

rebooted without the memory card in (figured they may be clashing somehow), but still the same unplayable game. So then i moved saves back to the memory card and removed hard drive.

Went to play the game, voila, back to normal relatively seamless loading times using the memory card.
Anyone else heard of this or know the reason why this happens to my hard drive?
I thought getting a hard drive would improve loading times, instead its the complete opposite :confused:
Click to expand...

Perhaps it's something to do with the saved game having been created without the drive being installed? Maybe it needs to initialise something when a new game is started.
 
Vogon said:
I did actualy wonder today how I can defrag the hard drive ... another thing, I have A new Xbox, so no stuff on it yet, not even a profile, but it says 12gb free ... surely the OS cant take 8gb ? :eek:

Sorry to go OT, but this is kinda related :o
Click to expand...

99% of that is for original xbox emulation, the other 1% is Hexic HD
 
I've been using this trick since I first got oblivion and I can definatelty say it works. The first load time after clearing the cache seems to take an age but after that everything is nice and fast :).
 
Perhaps it's something to do with the saved game having been created without the drive being installed? Maybe it needs to initialise something when a new game is started.
Click to expand...

This could be the reason it seems the most plausible (thanks Oliver), as that trick of clearing the cache defintely did not improve things in my case...

Wouldn't you think though, it would be a simple case of transferring saves between drives without any disruption lol.

Never mind, only 3 hours wasted trying to figure out the problem :eek:

Memory card back in, game back to normal, and gotta say, Oblivion is just a totally class game, not an RPG fan by any stretch but this is so accessible and immersive :D
 
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